A look at Sony's Next Generation Portable video game system

Sony has chosen to stoke interest in the Next Generation Portable in the days leading up to the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Several games were on display at a pre-E3 event three weeks ago and Game Hunters Mike Snider and Marc Saltzman were on hand to test-drive some of the games including Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout and the augmented reality game Reality Fighters. Currently the successor to the PSP is expected to come to market in spring 2012, around the end of Sony's financial fiscal year. However, we expect an update on its arrival -- and a price -- at Sony's E3 press event on Monday night. Sony worldwide studios president Shuhei Yoshida said that the NGP offers a "great chance to work on totally new (intellectual property)" but including a game like Uncharted: Golden Abyss provides some reassurance to consumers "that the biggest IP that we have on the console are coming to the NGP." Games such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Wipeout give "a reference point for people," he says. "We're showing how close we can make this version on NGP." The NPG has a vivid 5-inch OLED (organic light-emitting diode) touch screen display; multi-touch extends to the back panel of the system, too. We got to use that cool feature -- more about it in coming days. Game movement can be done via the Sixaxis motion-sensing combination of gryoscope and accelerometers. And there's the dual analog sticks. "The NGP, for the first time incorporates a true console-like user interface, meaning the sticks," Yoshida says. "The biggest omission of the PSP was two analog sticks because in today's 3-D graphics gaming, you need two sticks to navigate through 3-D space." The touch sensitive back panel lets players "interact with the game world and characters from the front back and side," he says. "This is totally new." When players tackle Uncharted on the NGP, they can choose several ways to navigate. "In the wallclimbing level, you can point the left analog stick and press X to get Nathan Drake to jump from stone to stone, but ultimately you can touch the screen where you want Nathan to go or draw the line to drag Nathan to show 'Here is the way.' It's a very intuitive and fun way to navigate the game." A pair of camera lenses, one facing each direction, comes into play in Reality Fighters, which lets you insert yourself into the game and do combat on a real-world backdrop. "You can take a photo of yourself and create yourself in the game as a fighting character," Yoshida says. "So when you create yourself you can put yourself and other characters on the floor and play the games as if you are standing on the floor through this window. It's a fun and unique experience." For improved connectivity, the NPG offers Wi-Fi and 3GS support that will let you see what your PSN friends are playing and have done lately. "You can immediately start the game or check out what your friends are doing. If you have the 3G version, you are connected to our service all the time, so immediately you can see your friends' achievements, their scores or issue a challenge or see new creations of LittleBigPlanet that were posted by your friends," he says. "So you can check them out through the user interface without going through a different service. Everything is integrated." The NGP, while comfortable in the hands, is larger than most smartphones. "That was a huge discussion, Yoshida says. "If we have to cram things into a small form factor that really affects the gameplay aspect, like the button and analog stick. There is no way to put your analog control in a thing as small as a cell phone. To provide the true playability, we needed to have a certain size. … So many portable devices like smartphones offer some casual gameplay. We cannot just do the same thing. It has to have strong reason for people to buy a game-dedicated device." Eventually, Sony will begin releasing games through its PlayStation Suite initiative that can be played on NGP and PlayStation-certified smartphones such as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play released last month (See Edward C. Baig's review here). "We look at it as an entire PlayStation ecosystem that not only extends from smartphones in any form of portable gaming bridging to NGP, but ultimately connecting to the console," says Sony Computer Entertainment America president Jack Tretton. "We want to get you into the PlatStation family and if it starts on an Android-based smartphone, we hope it leads to a dedicated portable device like NGP and ultimately connecting to somebody being a dedicated console as well. That is the migration we are ultimately looking for."